Yeah - I’ve even seen people recommend switching distros just because another has a different default DE without understanding that most distros let you install multiple DEs…
The differences between distros aren’t as big as people make them out to be*. Mostly just installer, how packages are managed, what versions of packages you get, etc.
I guess? It’s it a shame that lfs uses C code instead of the “less abstract” x86 assembly?
(I like having it in my daily driver, but it’s sad LFS had to drop support for a “lower level” init system)
It’s not lower-level, it’s just worse.
You’re not changing much when you’re changing distros
This needs to be a pinned comment on every distro-hopping post.
Sounds like you haven’t taken the time to properly design your environment.
Lots of home gamers just throw stuff together and just “hack things till they work”.
You need to step back and organize your shit. Develop a pattern, automate things, use source control, etc. Don’t just file follow the weirdly -opinionated setup instructions. Make it fit your standard.
Okay - then everything is working fine. You’ve ruled out all of your options.
I didn’t realize it was using a remote-desktop setup. Still 2-D rendering performance could be an issue in the browser depending on whether it’s using accelerated graphics or not.
There are performance metrics other than CPU/memory usage. Like network latency, disk i/o, and bandwidth. UI performance on remote desktops tends to suffer from latency even with fast machines on local networks. The “proxmox console” for VMs I run in browser is a remote desktop and it performs… well enough for a server but I wouldn’t want to do anything significant in it. And that’s just presenting a desktop.
You haven’t described the nature of your ‘poor performance’ well though. Is it display latency like I’m describing or things like loading projects or creating STL files that is slow?
Are you familiar with remote desktop or ssh?
Very.
I didn’t realize that’s what this was doing though. Still requires a bit of client-side rendering performance from the browser and network capability. Depending on what potato they’re using on the desktop the latency might be giving the perception of “slowness”.
It’s still an intensive part though.
A lot of the work FreeCAD does is in the client though. Rendering the display. That’s not going to be done server-side.
basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions
That’s 99% of what most people do.
Neat. That’s going nowhere. Less formatting than even markdown… Hey kids you like plain text files right?
The last thing I want to see when I clock out is another terminal screen.
I’m reacting to this mostly. Self-hosters are a bit of an obnoxious blend of people who want turnkey-but-not-Google solutions and people willing to learn how to do things. People whining about “having to use a terminal” are generally in the former category.
Then don’t self host?
…it answers from the attached KBs only. If the fact isn’t there, it tells you - explicitly - instead of winging it.
So you’ve made a FAQ with a LLM interface? I could see that potentially being useful for cooperate “let our bot answer your questions” tools.
But the usefulness of AI isn’t just in “tell me a fact”. Like what would your AI give for "what functions would I use in Python to convert a utf16 string to utf8? Would the answer need to be in the KB already?
You can just spin up VMs on any Linux distro. Running unraid as a desktop (or proxmox) is kinda ridiculous.
What are IO and Iotop?
Input / Output.
Reading and writing to disk, network, etc.
iotop shows will show applications writing and reading from disk. It’s going to likely be pretty sporadic.
What may be happening, and what others are suggesting, is that you’re running out of memory (8gig isn’t that much these days). When that happens the system starts writing memory to disk so it can free more. That’s what you see with the “swap” usage. You can see a bit more about your memory usage with free -m:
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 64141 17077 24020 1981 30419 47063
Swap: 20479 0 20479
Using swap space isn’t necessarily bad. But reading/writing to it frequently can be a performance killer. You can monitor that with a command called vmstat:
$ vmstat -w 3
--procs-- -----------------------memory---------------------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----------cpu----------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st gu
1 0 0 24590136 70748 31066604 0 0 228 309 9959 18 8 1 91 0 0 0
0 0 0 24595172 70748 31065076 0 0 0 119 3159 6677 2 1 98 0 0 0
2 0 0 24607436 70748 31070316 0 0 2300 75 3147 6693 2 1 97 0 0 0
0 0 0 24594892 70748 31070316 0 0 0 584 3417 5950 1 1 98 0 0 0
The columns to pay attention to there are under the ---swap-- header. si is “Swap In” and so is "Swap Out. Those are reads/writes to and from swap space. Seeing a little activity there is fine. It is typically pretty spikey. But if you’re seeing lots of numbers there then it could just indicate that you’re running low on memory and the OS needs to move things to and from disk frequently. While it’s moving things to and from the disk the application trying to use that memory has to wait.
How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 64141 17213 24010 1984 30297 46927
Swap: 20479 0 20479
See that buff/cache column? That’s memory being used by the system for caching. Files you you open and access get cached into memory as do inodes, filesystem objects, etc. If you run a “find / -type f” twice in a row the second one will be significantly faster because the first run cached a lot of objects into memory.
By starving the system of memory all that will be flushed and you get more disk access doing things you’re actually trying to do. Whereas things sitting in swap are there because they aren’t currently needed.
By turning off swap and then back on again you’re just forcing the system to drop all that cache which it will then attempt to reclaim space for and push things back out to swap.
I don’t know what benefit you think you’ll gain in the process.
Good luck getting an admin to register your VM with Active Directory.